IBM SP2 - 1993

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The RS/6000 SP system hosts dozens to hundreds processing capability. The basic SP building block is the processor node. It consists of a POWER3 or PowerPC Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP), memory, Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) expansion slots for Input/Output (I/O) and connectivity, and disk devices. Nodes have either a Symmetric MultiProcessor (SMP) configuration (using MCA). The three types of nodes (thin, wide, and high) may be mixed in a system and are housed in short or tall system frames. Depending on the type of nodes used, an SP tall frame can contain up to 16 nodes and an SP short frame can contain up to 8 nodes. These frames can be interconnected to form a system with up to 128 nodes (512 by special order). Each node contains its own copy of the AIX operating system.